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Joseph Smith's Revision of the Bible: Fraudulent, Pathologic, Or Prophetic?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Philip L. Barlow
Philip L. Barlow
Affiliation:
Hanover College
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Extract

Joseph Smith, the nineteenth-century Mormon founder, is often accounted for in one of three ways. Either he was a prophet in the almost fundamentalist sense that many Mormons hold him to have been, or he was a charlatan as many others have judged, or else he was a mentally deranged charismatic. In what has been the most influential study of Smith during the last half-century, Fawn Brodie bridged the latter two categories. Brodie alleged that Mormonism's founder was initially a conscious fraud who fabricated his first visionary experience; only gradually, by a series of wondrous psychological acrobatics, did he later come to take himself seriously as one called of God.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , January 1990 , pp. 45 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1990

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References

1 Such belief might include, for example, the propositions that the Book of Mormon is, unambiguously and unproblematically, God's word in print; that it is a straightforward translation of an ancient record written on gold plates, conveying with strict historical accuracy the words and actions of actual ancient figures; that the revelations recorded in The Doctrine and Covenants contain the words of the resurrected Christ just as he spoke them to Joseph Smith; or that the changes Smith made in his revision of the Bible primarily represent inspired restorations of ancient material that had been corrupted in transmission over the centuries.

2 The bulk of practicing Mormons adopt the first position (scholarly examples are found in Reynolds, Noel, ed., Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins [Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 1982])Google Scholar. Virtually everyone else who takes a published stand holds either the second view (e.g., Arbaugh, George, Revelation in Mormonism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932])Google Scholar or the third (DeVoto, Bernard, “The Centennial of Mormonism,” American Mercury [01 1930])Google Scholar. Most scholars remaining outside the above categories do so not by positing a new theory regarding Smith, but by focusing on questions other than the truth or falsity of Smith's claims. For instance, Hill, Donna (Joseph Smith: the First Mormon [New York: Doubleday, 1977])Google Scholar, who produced the first major biography of Mormonism's founder since Fawn Brodie's, avoids conclusions about Smith's authenticity as a prophet. Instead, she seeks to present “the dramatic and human elements of his story, to show the warmth, spirituality and joyousness, for which his people loved him, his foibles, his implacable will and something of his complexity” (ix, x). Another example is Bushman, Richard (Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984])Google Scholar who, though identifying himself as a believing Mormon and taking issue with what he considers unfair or uninformed a criticisms of the Book of Mormon, nevertheless does not attempt to prove Joseph Smith's divine call. Rather, he succeeds admirably in relating events “as the participants themselves experienced them, using their own words where possible” (3). Similarly, the important work of Shipps, Jan (Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985])Google Scholar, while seeming to acknowledge Joseph Smith's sincerity and sanity, still finds that “as far as history is concerned, the question of whether Smith was prophet or fraud is not particularly important” (39). Thus, the basic categories used to explain the nature of Smith's claims remain “fraud,” “pathology,” or “prophetic revelation” (as understood by official or apologetic Mormon literature).

Two exceptions to this pattern are Hansen, Klaus, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 13–27Google Scholar, and Brink, T. L., “Joseph Smith: the Verdict of Depth Psychology,” Journal of Mormon History 3 (1976) 73–83Google Scholar. Brink (a non-Mormon) suggests four possible psychological explanations of Smith's behavior that allow for both sanity and religious sincerity. For instance, he posits a Jungian perspective, wherein Joseph Smith tapped “the vast reservoir of creative energies within the collective unconscious,” which he communicated to society through symbols such as the Urim and Thummim and the gold plates. Hansen brilliantly and speculatively makes use of Julian Jaynes's controversial study, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1977)Google Scholar. While neither of these scholars look in detail at the specific texts of Smith's revelation as this study does, neither do I attempt, as they do, an extended psychological treatment. Nevertheless, the conclusions I suggest in this essay are theoretically compatible with theirs in that we grant that Smith was both sane and sincere and yet argue that his revelations, as viewed by popular Mormonism, are problematic.

3 Brodie, Fawn, No Man Knows My History (1945; reprint New York: Knopf, 1971)Google Scholar. Interestingly, Brodie's contentions reversed those of Riley, I. W., who argued in The Founder of Mormonism, a Psychological Study of Joseph Smith, Jr. (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1902Google Scholar) that Smith's early visions derived from epilepsy (brought on by inherited nervous instability, alcoholism, sickness, and fright), that the epileptic seizures stopped when Smith was twenty-three years old, and that the subsequent revelations were deliberate self-serving hoaxes.

4 This delayed acceptance was a consequence of tensions between, on the one hand, Brigham Young and those who followed him west and, on the other, Emma Smith (Joseph Smith's wife who retained the documents of her husband's revision) and those who, like her, remained in the midwest, rejecting Young's leadership. Portions of this latter group coalesced during the 1850s into the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In 1867 this Reorganized Church published Smith's biblical revision as The Holy Scriptures. Utah Mormons tended to be suspicious of this book, wondering whether their founding prophet's work was presented un-altered. This century-long suspicion faded quickly after 1970, and in 1979 the LDS Church published its own edition of the King James Bible, which incorporated many of Smith's revisions in its notes and an appendix.

5 E.g., 1 Nephi 13:20-29; 3 Nephi 12, 13, 14, 22, 24.

6 Etzenhouser, Rudolph, The Three Bibles: Scholarship and Inspiration Compared (Independence, MO: Herald Publishing House, 1894)Google Scholar; Sperry, Sidney and Wagoner, Merrill Y. Van, “The Inspired Revision of the Bible,” Improvement Era 43:4 (04-09, 1940) 206, 251–53Google Scholar; Bartholomew, Calvin, “A Comparison of the Authorized Version and the Inspired Revision of Genesis” (Master's thesis, Brigham Young University [BYU], 1949)Google Scholar; Clark, James R., The Story of the Pearl of Great Price (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1955)Google Scholar; Harris, James, “A Study of the Changes in the Content of the Book of Moses from the Earliest Available Sources to the Current Edition” (Master's thesis, BYU, 1958)Google Scholar; Whipple, Walter, “An Analysis of Textual Changes in ‘The Book of Abraham’ and in the ‘Writings of Joseph Smith, the Prophet’ in the Pearl of Great Price” (Master's thesis, BYU, 1959)Google Scholar chap. 3 and Appendixes C and D; Matthews, Robert, “A Study of the Doctrinal Significance of Certain Textual Changes made by the Prophet Joseph Smith in the Four Gospels of the Inspired Version of the New Testament” (Master's thesis, BYU, 1960)Google Scholar; idem, “A Study of the Text of the Inspired Revision of the Bible” (Ph.D. diss., BYU, 1968)Google Scholar; Durham, Reed, “A History of Joseph Smith's Revision of the Bible” (Ph.D. diss., BYU, 1965)Google Scholar; and Howard, Richard, Restoration Scriptures (Independence, MO: Herald Publishing House, 1969)Google Scholar.

7 Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. To the extent that they deal with the nature of the revision, the essays in Nyman, Monte S. and Millet, Robert L., eds., The Joseph Smith Translation (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 1985Google Scholar) follow or assume Matthews's position. Robert Millet attempts to establish the ancient character of parts of the revision in “Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible and the Synoptic Problem,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 5 (1985) 41–46Google Scholar.

8 Hutchinson, , “The Joseph Smith Revision and the Synoptic Problem: An Alternative View,” The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 5 (1985) 99–125Google Scholar, and “A Mormon Midrash? LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 21:4 (Winter 1988) 11–74Google Scholar. See also Barney, Kevin L., “The Joseph Smith Translation and Ancient Texts of the Bible,” Dialogue 19:3 (Fall 1986) 85–102Google Scholar.

9 See especially Hill, Marvin S., “Secular or Sectarian History? A Critique of No Man Knows My History,” CH 43 (1974) 78–96Google Scholar, from whom I have borrowed the examples that follow above. (Smith's writings are full of similar ones.) Other treatments basically at odds with Brodie and others who have alleged Smith's fraudulence include Donna Hill, Joseph Smith: The First Mormon; Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition; Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism; and Anderson, Richard L., Joseph Smith's New England Heritage (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1971)Google Scholar.

10 See Faulring, Scott H., ed., An American Prophet's Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature, in association with Smith Research Associates, 1987)Google Scholar. For Smith's speeches during the last five years of his life, see Ehat, Andrew F. and Cook, Lyndon W., eds., The Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, UT: BYU, Religious Studies Center, 1980)Google Scholar.

11 Faulring, , An American Prophet's Record, 14Google Scholar.

12 Comments at the Sunstone Theological Symposium, Salt Lake City, Utah, August, 1983.

13 For a summary of the Bible's cultural status in Joseph Smith's time, see “Introduction: The Bible in Antebellum America,” in Barlow, Philip L., Mormons and the Bible: the Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar, forthcoming). For more detailed studies, see Hatch, Nathan O., “The Christian Movement and the Demand for a Theology of the People,” The Journal of American History 67 (1980) 545–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the essays by Hatch, Noll, and Marsden in Hatch, Nathan O. and Noll, Mark A., eds., The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

14 Paine doubted a great deal more than the Bible's textual accuracy. “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God,” he argued in The Age of Reason (New York: The Thomas Paine Foundation, n.d.) 18–20Google Scholar.

15 Hills, Margaret T., The English Bible in America (New York: The American Bible Society, 1961)Google Scholar.

16 Sims, P. Marion, The Bible in America (New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1936) 97Google Scholar.

17 Thomas, Cecil K., Alexander Campbell and His New Version (St. Louis: The Bethany Press, 1958) 42Google Scholar. Some writers have tried to establish that, through Sidney Rigdon, Smith was influenced by the contents of Campbell's New Testament. This appears to be erroneous. See Durham, Reed C., “A History of Joseph Smith's Revision,” 17–19Google Scholar.

18 Editorial, The Evening and the Morning Star, Independence, MO., 07 1833, 2. 106Google Scholar.

19 The Book of Mormon was advertised for sale 26 March 1830. “The Church of Christ,” as it was first called, was formally organized on 6 April 1830.

20 Smith, Joseph, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (ed. Roberts, B. H.; 7 vols.; Salt Lake City: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1932-1951) 1. 98–101Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as HC.

21 The fourth volume of Mormon scripture, along with the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and The Doctrine and Covenants. The Pearl of Great Price consists principally of writings attributed to Moses and Abraham and also includes Joseph Smith's narration of his own history and the rise of the Mormon church. The Doctrine and Covenants consists largely of revelations given to Smith.

22 HC 1. 131–33. While the additions concerning Enoch are the most striking and lengthy, substantial material without biblical parallel was also inserted about such figures as Noah and Melchizedek.

23 HC 1. 134–36; Moses 7:28-31, 33, 41, 44.

24 The few words recorded in Genesis about Enoch include the tantalizing observation that “he walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (5:24). Heb 11:5 extends this to say that Enoch did not taste death but was “translated.” Jude 14 quotes a prophecy from the apocryphal Enoch (1.9), reflecting the esteem in which the early Christian church held that book.

25 Moses 7:69, 62–63.

26 Bushman, , Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 186–87Google Scholar. Jan Shipps, Mormonism, has provided an insightful analysis of the Mormons' movement “out of the primordial present into the future by replicating the [scriptural, mythological] past.” See, e.g., chap. 3, “History as Text,” esp. 52–53.

27 Although Smith said in 1833 that he had “finished the translation of the Bible,” he offered many corrections of the biblical text in his public discourses between 1833 and 1844 that are not found in the manuscripts of his “new translation.” In addition to the circumstantial evidence witnessing to the incomplete status of Smith's efforts provided by Robert Matthews (“A Plainer Translation,” chap. 10), we have a statement attributed to Smith as late as 1840 that he should again “commence the work of translating the Egyptian records, the Bible, and wait upon the Lord for…revelations.…” (HC 4. 137).

28 The original documents behind this publication are: (1) an 1828 King James Bible (with apocrypha), purchased by Smith and Oliver Cowdery in October 1829, with various markings in pencil and ink; and (2) several folders containing hundreds of sheets of paper with writing on both sides by various scribes, principally Sidney Rigdon. These documents reveal that the revision progressed in stages. Many passages contain not only revisions of the KJV, but re-visions of revisions of still earlier revisions. Other passages show evidence of revisions that were later discarded in favor of the original KJV reading. Others yet show later revisions of biblical chapters previously marked “correct.” See Matthews, , “A Plainer Translation,” 81–86Google Scholar. Smith clearly experimented with the Bible as he sought to bring its text in line with his under-standing and the insights of his revelations.

29 Ibid., 39–40, 49–52.

30 Ibid., 424–25, 243. Figures exclude spelling and punctuation changes (which are frequent but rarely significant). To the 662 verses changed in Genesis I have added the 25 verses of Smith's June 1830 revelation that constitute Genesis chapter “0” in Holy Scriptures. As with most statistics, these are indicative only and their use invites caution: not all verses are of the same length; versification in the Smith translation and the KJV are often not identical; verses with slight alterations are counted as equal with others having more significant changes, etc.

31 An example is Smith's addition of four verses between vss 8 and 9 in Matthew 7, where the disciples are presented as interrupting the Sermon on the Mount with questions, thus providing an opportunity for Jesus to clarify and elaborate his thoughts.

32 This theological category in my schema often overlaps with other types of changes.

33 To recognize the assumptions behind Smith's effort to harmonize scriptural contradictions is important. It is quite a different thing to construe the scriptures as imperfectly transmitted over the centuries, and therefore in need of emendation, than it is to allow that the biblical writers could have been mistaken or at odds with one another. Many contemporaneous Ameri-cans (and even many modern ones) shared Smith's assumptions about the necessity of perfect internal harmony in the Bible, but where Smith rectified the problem by altering the text, others ignored the conflicts or rationalized them as only apparent contradictions.

34 Matthews, , “A Plainer Translation” 283–389Google Scholar.

35 Or, as Smith believed, “common sense” made uncommon by inspiration.

36 Through 1833, when most of the work on the revision was accomplished, Smith knew no foreign or ancient languages. He later studied Hebrew and apparently other languages and in a few instances incorporated insights from this exposure into changes in the KJV (sometimes only orally in his sermons).

37 Smith, Joseph Fielding, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1976) 327Google Scholar.

38 HC 6. 58.

39 HC 1. 245, emphasis added.

40 Though the examples discovered thus far are not as impressive as several instances in the Book of Mormon, some LDS scholars feel there is limited but significant ancient textual sup-port for a few of Smith's changes, and that there are literary characteristics that suggest the ancient character of some changes. Examples include Matthews, “A Plainer Translation,” chap. 12; Paul R. Cheesman and C. Griggs, Wilfred, Scriptures for the Modern World (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1984) 79–83Google Scholar; Nyman, and Millet, , eds., The Joseph Smith Translation, 42–45Google Scholar and passim; and Millet, “Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible and the Synoptic Problem.”

The examples these scholars cite are better explained by Smith's effort to remove difficul-ties in the KJV— to harmonize scripture with itself, with “common sense,” and with his own revelations—than by an actual restoration of ancient texts. Like Joseph Smith, ancient copyists had motives to harmonize apparent inconsistencies and may occasionally have produced results similar to Smith's. Other scholars have challenged the idea that any of Smith's revisions rep-resent restorations of original texts. Most recently, Anthony Hutchinson has presented what appears to be an overwhelming case that Smith patterned his variant forms of the Genesis creation narratives after what often prove to be mistaken KJV translations of Hebrew texts. Thus, argues Hutchinson, “the Joseph Smith texts may well be better understood as more recent midrash-like reworkings of the KJV” rather than restorations of original Hebrew texts marred by errant scholars ( “A Mormon Midrash? LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 21 [Winter 1988] 11–71)Google Scholar.

41 Brodie, , No Man Knows My History, 68–69Google Scholar. Some scholars may wish to assign some form of insanity to recipients of visions almost by definition. This, however, is a rather subjective exercise: one would have to be prepared to write off the mental competence of a vast array of characters.

42 As Sydney Ahlstrom (following Brodie) suggests, it is true that such writings as the Book of Mormon, which show the impact of the antebellum American setting in which they were produced, cannot engage readers in quite the same way they did in the 1830s ( Ahlstrom, , A Religious History of the American People [2 vols.; Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1975] 1. 608Google Scholar; Brodie, , No Man Knows My History, 69)Google Scholar. However, Brodie and Ahlstrom underestimate the continuing power of the Book of Mormon (and by implication, Smith's biblical revision and other revelations) on Mormonism's several million adherents and the more than two hundred thousand converts who join Mormon ranks each year. This is far too large and rapidly growing a group to dismiss as a “few isolated, atypical individuals” who can still read the book as a religious testimony. Of course, the Book of Mormon and Smith's other revelations are not the only attraction for these converts; they may not even be the primary ones. But certainly they remain significant.

43 HC 5. 425.

44 This tendency could be easily overstated. In general, Smith believed his revelations and the correctly recorded Bible were parts of one truth. He once said, after reconciling a conflict in two biblical passages, “If any man will prove to me, by one passage of Holy Writ, one item I believe to be false, I will renounce and disclaim it as far as I [have promulgated] it” (HC 6. 57).

45 Later in his career he may have allowed more room for paradox (depending on how one interprets his meaning). For example, three weeks before his death he observed that “[By] proving contraries, truth is made manifest” (HC 6. 428).

46 May, Ernest R., “Ghost Writing and History,” American Scholar 22 (Autumn 1953) 459–65Google Scholar.

47 May, , “Ghost Writing,” 460Google Scholar.

48 Adams, Herbert, The Life and Writings of Jared Sparks… (2 vols.; Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1893) 2. 271Google Scholar.

49 May, , “Ghost Writing,” 461Google Scholar.

50 Loewenberg, Bert James, American History in American Thought (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) 186Google Scholar; Butterfield, L. H. and Boyd, Julian, Historical Editing in the Untied States (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1963) 1–28Google Scholar; Jessee, Dean C., “The Reliability of Joseph Smith's History,” Journal of Mormon History 3 (1976) 23–46Google Scholar. The notion of authorship, even in cases where individual writers do not consciously base their work on that of others, could be explored fruitfully at much greater length. See the thoughtful essays by Roland Barthes and others in Caughie, John, ed., Theories of Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)Google Scholar.

51 Jessee, , “The Reliability of Joseph Smith's History,” 23–46Google Scholar.

52 Fawn Brodie, unaware that Smith was not the direct and sole author of the History of the Church, correctly noticed that these volumes reveal very little about Smith's inner self. With a brilliant intuition (unfortunately based on a false premise) she was moved to quote (accurately) Smith in entitling his biography, No Man Knows My History. “Few men…have written so much and told so little about themselves,” Brodie wrote (vii).

53 Anciently, such broad conceptions of authorship existed side by side with instances of genuine forgery, as cautioned against, e.g., in 2 Thess 2:2.

54 Biblical scholar Raymond Brown summarizes the practice: “In considering biblical books, many times we have to distinguish between the author whose ideas the book expresses and the writer. The writers run the gamut from recording secretaries who slavishly copied down the author's dictation to highly independent collaborators who, working from a sketch of the author's ideas, gave their own literary style to the final work.…Even if we confine authorship to responsibility for the basic ideas that appear in the book, the principles that determine the attribution of authorship in the Bible are fairly broad. If a particular author is surrounded by a group of disciples who carry on his thought even after his death, their works may be attributed to him as author. The Book of Isaiah was the work of at least three principal contributors, and its compositions covered a period of over 200 years.…In a similar way, David is spoken of as author of the Psalms, and Moses [as] the author of the Pentateuch, even though parts of these works were composed many hundreds of years after the traditional author's death.” Brown, Raymond, The Gospel According to John (New York: Doubleday, 1966) xxxviiGoogle Scholar. New Testament scholarship has demonstrated a similar process.

55 See e.g., The Doctrine and Covenants 35:18, 20; 37:1; 41:7; 42:56-58; 45:60-61.